As an occasionally rebellious teenager, I identified with the zany, self-absorption of the title character in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s engaging new film. The rising high-school senior, played by Saoirse Ronan, casts herself as a trailblazer, even as she exhibits all the contradictory impulses of most youthful rebel-conformists.

As the mother of three adult children, I also embraced the trials and missteps of Lady Bird’s hard-working mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who struggles with a martyr complex. She clearly loves her daughter, but doesn’t necessarily like the entitled offspring who rattles around the family’s middle-class home.

Lady Bird yearns to break free and attend a pricy prestigious university across the country, despite her middling academic record and her father’s lack of employment.

Her frustrated mother, a nurse, lashes out and suggests that “city college” and “jail” are in her future. Their fitful efforts to find common ground provide a framework of this unusually appealing film, which made headlines this week after it received 100 percent favorable reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, breaking a record.

The family lives in Sacramento, California, and Lady Bird, whose given name is “Christine,” attends a Catholic girls’ high school. Viewers who have grown weary of the negative depiction of Catholic women religious, priests and parochial schools, will be pleasantly surprised by the film’s sympathetic treatment of the stable, warm faith-based community that Lady Bird often takes for granted.

In one pivotal scene that sheds light on the conflictive mother-daughter bond, Lady Bird meets with her high school principal, Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), to discuss college plans. The teenager says she wants to get out of Sacramento, but Sister Sarah Joan, referring to Lady Bird’s college application essay, asks her to think twice.

“It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” she tells the girl.

Lady Bird is taken aback, but finally acknowledges a deep familiarity with the town she frequently disparages.

“I guess I pay attention,” she tells the principal.

This comment offers a fresh way of interpreting mother-daughter combat, and it will resonate with viewers as they absorb the painful barbs and conciliatory language that punctuate the dialogue.

“I want you to be the very best version of yourself,” the mother tells her daughter.

After a lengthy pause, Lady Bird responds: “But what if this is the best version?”

Greta Gerwig helps her audience grapple with the deep, emotional currents that prompt us to wound the people we love.

And Catholics will treasure something else in this unusual film: It offers a palpable sense of hope that spiritual and emotional healing is possible.

Lady Bird’s family, with all its limitations, provides a stable loving environment where basic decency is the norm, and redemption is real.

The predictable rhythms of her high school, from the school Masses, to the tough math class, to the athletic-coach priest who uses football plays to direct students in the upcoming musical, are treated with respect and humor.

One part of Lady Bird wants to break free of this routine. The other part knows she is darn lucky to have a vigilant caring community that tolerates her quirky, occasionally idiotic behavior. This black sheep does go badly astray, and the film is not for children. (It earned an R rating for its language and sexual content.) But she knows there is a safety net. Forgiveness—from the Lord and from her cranky mother—is around the corner.

In contrast, another new film out in theaters now—The Florida Project—presents us with a very different world.

A young girl races with her ragtag friends through a shabby welfare hotel and the adjoining neighborhood, generally making a nuisance of herself. Her careless mother earns extra cash as a prostitute, and leaves the supervision of her child to the building manager, a rough, yet capable guardian angel.

The Florida Project is hard to sit through, because the viewer remains in constant fear that tragedy is close at hand and this young girl’s jaded kind of innocence will be shattered forever. Lady Bird sends the opposite message, and I wonder if that is why so many viewers loved the movie. Right now, we are starving for happy endings, and Lady Bird promises something like that, although her struggles are far from resolved at the film’s close.

According to news reports, Greta Gerwig also attended a Catholic girls’ high school in Sacramento, though she is not Catholic. That makes this beautiful, painful film about a teenager who wants to be loved unconditionally all the more fascinating.

In contrast to some movies made by religious filmmakers, Lady Bird offers a transcendent vision of life, yet it contains no awkward pietistic elements that can turn off most viewers. This is life redeemed by the Spirit. The black sheep amongst us will perk up their ears and take notice.

Wow, did we see the same movie? I was struck by its casual acceptance of teen sex, cohabitation, homosexuality (the only snag was the gay kid’s panic at having to tell his devout mom (because those Catholics, you know how THEY are), the priest having to leave because of his psychological problems (and the nurse mom asking “Do you have a support system?” “No”), the bland meaninglessness of the prayers, the girls scarfing down communion hosts (“They aren’t consecrated”)... ugh. There’s certainly no notion of “the Lord” forgiving her; that’s never even brought up, that I can recall.

Posted by icefalcon on Friday, Dec, 1, 2017 4:48 PM (EST):

Last week, my 24-year-old daughter and I (who both attended all-girls’ Catholic high schools) went to see this film. We both really enjoyed ourselves—parts of the dialogue made us think that the writer had been secretly recording some of our conversations!

See this movie! One of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.

Posted by jbg on Friday, Dec, 1, 2017 3:45 PM (EST):

“This black sheep does go badly astray…..But she knows there is a safety net. Forgiveness—from the Lord and from her cranky mother—is around the corner.”

Huh? That don’t sound right. It’s okay to sin because we know we will be forgiven?

Posted by Dan on Friday, Dec, 1, 2017 9:28 AM (EST):

I am guessing that Harvey Weinstein did not, in fact, produce Lady Bird

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Joan Frawley Desmond, is the Register’s senior editor. She is an award-winning journalist widely published in Catholic, ecumenical and secular media. A graduate of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and Family, she lives with her family in California..